Harry Wu (Chinese: 吴弘达; pinyin: Wú Hóngdá; February 8, 1937 – April 26, 2016) was a Chinese-American human rights activist.

Although cautious, Wu eventually voiced some sentiments, by disagreeing with the Soviet Union's military intervention in Hungary, and the practice of labeling people into different categories.

[1] By the Fall of 1956, China's leader, Mao Zedong abruptly reversed course and proclaimed that the true enemies of the Party had been exposed and 19-year-old Wu was subsequently singled out at his university.

"[1] For the next few years, Wu was continuously criticized in Party meetings and closely monitored until his arrest in 1960 at the age of 23 when he was charged with being a "counterrevolutionary rightist", and was sent to the laogai (China's system of forced-labor prison camps).

[2] Harry Wu was imprisoned for 19 years[3] in 12 different camps mining coal, building roads, clearing land, and planting and harvesting crops.

Lean and muscular, with missing teeth and ears that "looked black with dirt",[4] Xing taught Wu how to fight for survival in the camps.

He showed Wu how to dig for underground rat burrows in order to find clean caches of grain and beans which could then later be boiled for food to avoid starvation.

[8] Wu also found that those who had played a part in labeling him "an enemy of the people", leading to his imprisonment twenty years earlier, tended to react to his survival and return the same way: "All that has happened is in the past ... the Party has suffered too.

"[9] Wu left China for the United States in 1985, after having received a chance invitation from the University of California at Berkeley to be a visiting scholar.

Wu continued with various odd jobs during this period and in 1988 began working for an electronic chip manufacturer, where he became an assistant manager, and was able to buy a used car.

In 1986, Wu was asked to talk about his experiences in the camps in front of a class of college students at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[citation needed] In 1991, Wu did a story with Ed Bradley for 60 Minutes, in which they posed as businessmen interested in purchasing factory goods in mainland China that had been manufactured by the slave labor of Chinese prisoners.

[26] In 1997, Wu was presented with the Walter Judd Freedom Award by The Fund for American Studies for being an outspoken voice against tyranny and oppression.

Yahoo settled the lawsuit by establishing a $17 million fund to compensate and help Chinese dissidents, and chose Wu as its administrator.

[28] In March 2015, a Virginia woman named Wang Jing publicly accused Wu of sexually assaulting her and three underage girls, the daughters of Chinese dissidents who were under her guardianship, in late 2013.

Wang filed a lawsuit against Wu with the Fairfax County Circuit Court, and the case was scheduled to go on trial in January 2017.